Rabbi Hamilton’s Rosh Hashannah 5769 Sermon: Abraham’s ‘Moment of Seeing’ and Ours

I want to tell you a story – an utterly compelling story told by McGill Management Professor Nancy Adler about her mother Lisellot’s survival as a 14 year-old teen living in Vienna as the Nazi regime encircled and devoured her world.   On the day when Elite SS officers came to evict Lisellot’s family, she and her 19 year old brother were finishing their household chores.  Since it was inconceivable to the Nazis that Jews would actually engage in such chores, the Nazis ordered their parents to pay ‘the help’ and send them on their way.  With clubs raised and guns trained on him, Lisellot’s father paid his children for ‘their work’ and sent them out onto the street.

Separating from her brother, Lisellote began an odyssey, hunted down at every turn, of being taken in by righteous gentiles, only to be informed-on by suspicious neighbors.  Having narrowly escaped for a second consecutive night to locate some of her extended family cowering by the home of her aunt, she also found her mother.  But by late that night, she heard the screeching wheels of the SS pull up yet again, it became crystal clear to Lisellote, for the first time in her 14 years of life, that the adults in her life were uncertain, scared and had no idea what to do.

Then, writes Nancy Adler, “My mother decided she had to take matters into her own hands.  Having carefully observed the Nazis’ behavior, she realized that she did not fit their stereotypical image of a Jew, and with luck, could pass unmolested through the streets of Vienna.  The next morning, Lisellote took the streetcar downtown to find the father of one of her school friends and ask him for help.  Over the prior year, her girlfriend’s father had repeatedly told her, “If you or your family ever needs anything, you come to me.”  An hour later, Lisellote safely arrived at Gestapo headquarters, entered, and asked to see the man in charge, her girlfriend’s father.  Good to his word, the senior Gestapo officer located Lisellote’s father, ordered him released from prison, and arranged exit visas for the immediate family to leave the country within 30 days.

Leaving aside the unlikely decision of this Gestapo Commander to honor the promise he had made to Lisellote, I want to contemplate with you today what I would call young Lisellote’s “moment of seeing”, the moment she realized that those she had looked up to for wisdom and guidance, were completely at a loss for what to do next.    As Professor Adler says of her mother’s moment of truth “For reasons that are almost completely unimaginable to me growing up in the safe, affluent world of California, my mother chose to take matters into her own hands.”  

Today, at the dawn of the New Year 5769, although we live in very different times than Lisellote’s Vienna 68 years ago, our times are highly anxious in other ways.  That safe, affluent world that Professor Adler describes has witnessed an economic implosion of historic proportions that will affect us all if it hasn’t yet done so.

Many didn’t see it coming.  They knew the housing bubble would eventually burst, but they could not have imagined it would take down Wall Street and even threaten the stability of global markets.  We tend to disbelieve the prospect of unwelcome visits from history will ever happen to us.  Call it denial.  Call it naïvite.  We always imagine that dangers and catastrophe’s will happen to someone on the evening News – but not to us or those whom we know.  We walk through life convinced that our story will not intersect with stories of disaster or sudden loss. And yet, here we are.  As we enter the New Year, it is with hope to be sure, but it is also with high anxiety not only about what’s happening now to the financial systems in this country, but also about what may be coming around the next corner.

Lisellote was courageous, but she was also lucky.  Millions of others were not so lucky.  They were no less courageous or resourceful, but they were murdered.  Yet we have her story to consider and learn form – and what I want us to learn from it is that  NO MATTER WHAT DANGERS WE FACE, NO MATTER WHAT THE WORLD HURLS OUR WAY, NO MATTER HOW RUDELY HISTORY SHOWS UP AT OUR PARTICULAR DOORSTEP, WE CAN RESPOND WITH OUR BEST.

The reason why I believe this can be so – that we can respond with our best – has everything to do with two lessons found in our Prayer Book 1) the story we tell about Rosh Hashannah’s hero, our founding parent Abraham; and 2) the uniquely Jewish rapport with stories that is imbedded in the rabbinic name for  Rosh Hashannah, Yom Hazikaron.

First about our holiday’s hero Abraham, I have a question: Where does the shofar come from?  We all know, the ram that Abraham sacrifices in place of his beloved son Isaac.  We know why he doesn’t offer Isaac, but why a ram?  Thanks to a session with JTS’s Rabbi David Ackerman a couple of weeks ago, I now think I know the answer.  That Abraham offers a ram is anything but inevitable.  In fact, if you take a look at the story, when Isaac questions Abraham on their way up the mountain he asks,  “Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb to be offered?”  It should have been a lamb caught in the thicket.  Why did it become a ram?  Not just because lambs have no horns.

It turns out that the only prior mention in the Torah of a ram calls back to the actual covenantal moment between God and Abraham in Chapter 15 when a ram is among the offerings for the covenant between the pieces – the ritual that establishes God’s covenant with our people.  And, sure enough, right after Abraham offers the ram in place of Isaac, the angel restates verbatim the covenantal terms from that original covenantal moment between God and Abraham with the first ram back in Chapter 15.  This is an amazing point.  What it suggests is astonishing for me.  When we sound the Shofar, we not only awaken our need to return, but God’s need to return as well – to the first principles of our covenant.  The shofar is as much for us as it is for God.  Every time it is heard, it calls back to the foundation, the origin of our unique bond with our Maker.   

When Abraham names the mountaintop “Adona Yireh” God will make seen, I take it to mean that the ram creates that ‘moment of seeing’ for Abraham and for God – a moment that saved Liselotte and her family when the moment of truth had arrived.   She was able to puzzle together a course of action, however improbable, and she acted with deployed that plan without delay.   

And what I find even more astonishing about both Abraham’s offering of the ram AND his naming of the mountaintop is that both acts are entirely his own.  Neither God nor God’s angel asks for either.  Abraham takes matters into his own hands.  And how does God, as represented by Jewish tradition and law, respond to Abraham’s unilateral acts of offering the ram and naming that place?  By imbedding both the ram’s horn and the place with permanent significance – granting our People annual wake-up calls with the Shofar and daily direction with the mountaintop: the shofar’s enduring role heralding our return, Abraham’s mountaintop becoming the site in Jerusalem toward which we pray, are married, buried, and do everything important in our lives – for that becomes the mountaintop on which God chooses to establish God’s Name and Temples for all time.  Quite a ‘nod of approval from the Almighty’ to Abraham’s two self-initiated acts of offering the ram and naming the place.

And this is precisely what Lisellote did in her courageous moment which I am suggesting was her ‘moment of seeing.’  Terrified that there were no longer any adults she could look to for counsel, she, like Abraham, took matters into her own hands – recalling some critical lessons she had recently learned.  Her memory of being able to pass as not Jewish in the eyes of the authorities came from the bizarre circumstance of her and her brother being paid for their household chores and sent on their way.  Her moment of truth was her memory of what her friends father had repeatedly told her.  These memories proved vital, at the startling realization that she and she alone need to write the next chapter of her story.  

Abraham’s initiative – Abraham’s shofar – invites and encourage such ‘moments of seeing’ for each and every one of us to this very day. Such moments grant us the opportunity to pause and focus, to widen the breadth of possibilities available to us from narrow straights, such ‘moments of seeing’ re-enchant our own stories with promise and purpose.

We never know when unwelcome history will intrude, move it and take over our lives.  But there is something else about today – not just Abraham’s shofar, but also imbedded in the very identity of Rosh Hashannah that suggest we’ll always know how to respond to history’s intrusions with our best.

When we consider our rapport with history – whether we see in coming, whether we recognizing it while its occurring, and how adept we are at interfacing with it, the very name of Rosh Hashannah. – called by the rabbis Yom Hazikaron – a day of memory helps guide us to our best.

Calling Rosh Hashannah ‘a day of memory’ is significant because it points to the startling fact that in all of Biblical and Rabbinic literature there is no Hebrew word for history.  That’s right, no Hebrew word for history.  Given that gravity in Judaism of an attachment to our past, this is all the more surprising.  Instead, the Hebrew word for this attachment is always Zachor, meaning memory, hence today’s Holiday’s name Yom Hazikaron.  Rabbi Jonathan Sacks points out an important difference between history and memory.  History is his story.  Memory is my story.  There is nothing vicarious about memory, my story. Memory insists on being related, an immediate family member, with the story that is unfolding before our eyes – memory proclaims we are this story’s writer, actor, and producer.  

Here is the key, even though everybody has his or her own story, and many different stories whose orbits intersect.  We are only in a position to respond at our best when we relate to history as memory, when someone else’s story becomes my story.  So often painful stories drop in so unannounced because we see them as someone else’s, that they could happen to us is too improbable, so we go about our daily doings believing nothing will change and everything will be ok.  Thus our capacity to respond becomes impaired.  Rosh Hashannah’s name as a day of memory, reminds us of how important and helpful and necessary it is  – for us to be able to respond at our best, it needs to be our story…Responsibility can be defined literally as the ability to respond.  When our connection to a story is vicarious it is so much harder to give it the purity of our attention and energy it requires.

The historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has observed that Jews tend only to write histories of the Jewish People when Judaism is endangered.  Josephus wrote two thousand years ago around the destruction of the Temple. After that, there is a long gap without historical writings until the Spanish expulsion and subsequently with the arrival of modernity threat to the Jewish tradition.  When Judaism is under siege, history steps up.  When Jews are under siege, memory does.  

Stories are all around us.  To my thinking, this November’s Presidential election is really a contest between two of our nation’s most important stories: Iwo Jima and the Lincoln Memorial.  Both of these stories happen to be Jewish stories too.  But most fundamentally, the rabbis placed our core story of Abraham’s shofar fashioning a “moment of seeing” at the heart of our memory and experience this and every New Year.  

 It is a story that proclaims that God smiles on human initiative – particularly human initiative that designed to complement the beauty, coherence, and hope that God wants for our world.  More than smile, God champions our will to step into the breach wherever it is found – to widen the share of a better world with better people.

We know what’s been happening to Wall Street that seemed to come as such a surprise.  Are there things gathering that suggest a few months from now we’d kick ourselves for failing to see it coming?  Iran’s threat to Israel is certainly an example of a story too unimaginably horrific to not be taken seriously, personally, and preemptively.  May it be resolved with the minimum amount of violence possible.

The empowering combination of taking our story personally and Abraham’s shofar both translate into taking responsibility for how we respond to whatever befalls us and those dear to us.

Several men are in the locker room of a golf club. A cell phone on a bench rings and a man engages the hands free speaker function and begins to talk. Everyone else in the room stops to listen.
 MAN: ‘Hello’
 WOMAN: ‘Honey, it’s me. Are you at the club?’
  MAN: ‘Yes’
 
 WOMAN: ‘I am at the mall now and found this beautiful leather coat. It’s only $1,000. Is it OK if I buy it?’
 MAN: ‘Sure, go ahead if you like it that much.’
 
 WOMAN: ‘I also stopped by the Mercedes dealership and saw the new 2008 Models. I saw one I really liked.’
 MAN: ‘How much?’
 WOMAN: ‘$90,000′
 MAN: ‘OK, but for that price I want it with all the options.’
 
 WOMAN: ‘Great! Oh, and one more thing…the house I wanted last year is back on the market.  They’re asking $950,000′
 MAN: ‘Well, then go ahead and give them an offer of $900,000. They will probably take it. If not, we can go the extra 50 thousand if it’s really a pretty good price.’
 WOMAN: ‘OK. I’ll see you later! I love you so much!
 MAN: ‘Bye! I love you, too.’
 
 The man hangs up. The other men in the locker room are staring at him in   astonishment, mouths agape.
 He turns and asks: ‘Anyone know who this phone belongs to?’

Again, responding with our best means taking responsibility for what we do, say, and enact as did Abraham in our Torah’s Rosh Hashannah story.

Some have pointed to a sobering truth about life since the end of the 19th century. When we entered the 20th century, everybody was looking forward to a new era of progress.  At the turn of this new century everybody was looking backward, aghast at the bloodiest 100 years in human history.

Yet listen to Lisellot’s address just a few years ago when Austria invited her, as one of the few remaining survivors back to participate in the 1100-year birthday of a small town outside of Vienna where her mother had been born.  She chose her words, for the President of Austria and all Austrians carefully.

“This moment is crucial in history.  This moment, 65 years after throngs of Austrians cheered Hitler’s occupation of the country, marks a turning point.  No one can erase the murders of Grandma Laura and Grandma Nina.  No one can take Grandpa David out of the sadistic care of the doctors at the Viennese nursing-home-turned-torture-chamber in which he was condemned to suffer his final years.  Each of us, however, can and will create future history.  Ours is only to choose if that history will be founded on love, understanding, compassion, and respect, or on a repetition of Austria’s historic atrocities.  

 “The gateway to future history is today.  The choice point is right now.  There is no other time.  There is no other place.  Choose to have the courage to learn what really happened from the few remaining people gathered here today.  Hear the stories of courage and compassion.  Choose to take responsibility.”

Lisellote’s words, chosen carefully for the President of Austria and all Austrians, call back to the sweet spot of Abraham as God’s partner, initiator, courageous contrarian in the face of today’s ‘idolatries of despair.’  She embodies with courage and laser precision, the lesson of  Abraham’s choice to introduce the ram and to train our eyes and hearts on the mountain where ‘moments of seeing’ between individuals and God are possible.

Abi Nathan died last month.  He was a long time peace activist.  He took great risks to fly in behind enemy lines to work to warm chilled relations with Israel’s enemies.  He established the “Voice of Peace” radio station, broadcasting from somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea.  He was imprisoned and endured hunger strikes.  During one such strike he feared he might die, so he bought a plot and a tombstone.  When asked what he wanted inscribed on the stone, his response was a single word “Nisiti” “I tried.”

Facing instabilities economic, political, national, and personal in the year we have just begun, may we find an empowered place of memory-making on this Yom HaZikaron, this day of memory; and may we the courage of young Lisellote who followed the call of the Shofar from her ‘moment of seeing’ to meet the struggles and the needs of the hour inspire us.  This is the day.  There is no other.  And when all is said and done, may we find that others will have said of us, and more importantly that we will be able to say to ourselves, Nisiti, “I tried.”